Untitled (from Days, 1926)
by
Yevhen Pluzhnyk (1898-1936)
translated
by Roman Ivashkiv and Erín Moure
Detaching themselves from days, words
shrivel slowly in books, and days
are like a dark woods!
New joy in me:
Autumn rain on the roof.
You lie, you to whom everything is clear!
We prostrate ourselves before a dream!
Days! what a museum of
Drivel!!
Зі збірки "Дні" (1926)
Плужник Євген
Одірвались від днів слова,
В’януть собі по книжках, а у днях ―
мов у темному лісі!
Радість у мене нова:
Дощ осінній по стрісі.
Брешете ви,
кому ясно усе!
Перед мрією всі ми ниць!
Дні! який це музей
Дрібниць!
Born
in 1898, Yevhen Pluzhnyk was a Ukrainian poet, playwright, editor, and
translator. Due in part to a life-long battle with tuberculosis, he wrote
poetry imbued with stoicism and melancholy. A supremely talented writer, compared
to Rilke in his time, Pluzhnyk produced several poetry collections, plays,
translations, and a novel, and trained as an actor until his TB stopped him. In
1935, with other members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, he was arrested by
Stalin’s secret police and sent to a prison camp on the Solovki Island, where
he died from tuberculosis in 1936.
Roman Ivashkiv is
a Ukrainian-Canadian translator and scholar who teaches Slavic languages and
literatures and translation studies at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. With Erín Moure, he published an English translation of the
Ukrainian poet Yuri Izdryk’s collection entitled Smokes (2019).
Erín Moure is a poet
and translator based in Montreal. She’s Jake MacDonald Writer in Virtual
Residence at the University of Winnipeg in Fall 2021. More info at
erinmoure.mystrikingly.com if you like! She collaborates when she can with
Roman Ivashkiv on translations from Ukrainian poets.
